Who will be accountable
for language minority education?Jill Kerper Mora, Ed.D.
San Diego State University
This article was published as an "Expert Advise" column in the monthly newsletter of the California Teachers Association. Below is the bibliographical citation:
Mora, J.K. (1998). Who will be accountable for language minority education? California Educator 2 (6), 17-20
The "English for the Children" initiative, co-authored by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ron Unz and Santa Ana teacher Gloria Matta Tuchman, proposes to severely restrict bilingual education in California. The CTA has taken a position in opposition to the referendum that will appear on the June electoral ballot. The CTA position is correct because the proposed new law will have far-reaching effects on all teachers and all students. Many CTA members are opposed to the initiative in solidarity with our bilingual teacher colleagues who hold the Bilingual Cross-cultural Language and Academic Development (BCLAD) credential. However, some teachers may not have fully assessed the impact passage of this proposition would have on teachers who have earned their Cross-cultural Language and Academic Development (CLAD) credential and so-called "mainstream" teachers. The proposed law will shift the major responsibility for educating language-minority students away from bilingual and second-language educators and on to the teachers in regular classrooms, who are most likely not to have specialized training in teaching language minority students. Let us examine the provisions in the proposed statute that would take effect 60 days after its passage, that would cause this shift to take place.
The Unz/Tuchman plan will require that all limited English proficient students be placed in classrooms where teachers will use "sheltered or structured English immersion" for a "temporary transition period not normally intended to exceed one year." At the end of the year, or when children have acquired "a good working knowledge of English," they will be transferred to mainstream classrooms. Once they are transferred into the mainstream, they will be expected to perform on grade level with their native English-speaking peers in all areas of the regular state-mandated curriculum. The State Board of Education has recently adopted new academic standards in English Language Arts and will most likely approve new standards in mathematics in the next few weeks. Consequently, mainstream teachers will be expected to produce performance at the same high academic levels as students who are fully proficient in English with students who normally will have had only a year of English language instruction. This is a very tall order for even the most highly-skilled and experienced teachers. It is also most likely not going to work, for several reasons.
First, there is no reputable educational research to support the theory that children can learn enough English in one year to keep up, let alone catch up, academically with their native English-speaking age-mates. The teachers of these special "English language" classrooms, who will not be required to hold a BCLAD or CLAD credential, will be expected to perform a scholastic miracle. Children can be expected to make some gains in their communicative skills in their second language in one academic year. However, the level of English proficiency needed to understand more abstract concepts and to acquire reading and writing skills requires from five to seven years of exposure to the second language in academic settings to become fully developed.
The solution might then logically be to keep children in "structured immersion" for a longer period of time and to clearly delineate exit criteria that include academic performance. The statute does not provide for any assessment procedures for this purpose, and since it does not, parents could legally challenge any measures that might be taken to keep their children in these segregated classrooms for more than one academic year. The expectations of parents will be determined by the law that declares that is "normal" for a child to learn English in one year. It would be incumbent on the school administration to convince them that their child was "abnormal" in order to require more time in the English language classrooms. What this means is that a majority of the children will be transferred into mainstream classrooms through parental pressure after a year without being ready to perform at grade level in English.
A second aspect of the shifting of responsibility for the education of language-minority students is the area of literacy skills and content-area knowledge. According to the proposed statute, these classrooms will only have some modification to provide a "curriculum and presentation designed for children who are learning the language." What second-language educators understand as "sheltered English" instruction or Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English (SDAIE) is a methodology usually used with advanced English learners who are proficient at a level three or above on a five-point scale. The Unz/Tuchman plan, however, requires that this method be used with all levels of English learners, who will be grouped by levels in separate classrooms. The teachers of these classes will be expected to teach both English as a second language and content-area knowledge sufficient for the child to not fall behind while learning the language. This is not a pedagogically sound plan, since the methods required for ESL and for content-area teaching have some overlap, but differ in focus and procedures. Nor can students at the beginning levels of language learning be expected to easily master reading and writing skills in a language they cannot speak or understand.
A third area of concern raised by the proposed law is that there is no evaluation of the effectiveness of the one-year "structured immersion" program. Students will be transferred into the mainstream classrooms and tested using the same standardized tests and assessments required for all students in the school district. Unless school districts choose to collect separate evaluation data, the only data teachers and administrators will have to present to parents and the public to report on students’ progress will be the aggregated statistics from the school or district.
The lack of an evaluation plan in the proposed statute should be of great concern to all teachers, especially in light of the political proposals calling for "rewards and punishments" systems for assessing school performance and teacher evaluations based on gains in test scores of students in their individual classrooms. Where will the blame fall if test scores do not show a rise? Bilingual teachers, who will be prohibited from using the teaching strategies for which they have been trained and which they know to be most effective, will be "off the hook." This is especially true since the proposed statute provides that they can be sued by parents for personal financial liability if they are believed to be in violation of the implementation requirements. The teachers of the "structured immersion" English program will try their best, but cannot be held accountable to the public if their program is not evaluated, especially since that plan is not based on research-validated theory and effective instructional practices.
The responsibility for educating language-minority students to meet higher academic standards will fall primarily on the mainstream teachers. These teachers, ultimately, will have to explain why standardized test scores are not improving in the mainstream classrooms, where students will be tested for their academic progress. If test scores do not rise as a result of passage of the proposed statute, we as teachers can only claim that the voters are getting exactly what they asked for. Can we trust that they will be willing to listen?
To navigate Dr. Mora's CLAD Website click here:
This page was last updated on 07/26/02